A closer look from this female's perspective.

You came charging into this place with
your soft-spoken fast-talking voice
mumbling out the fucks that
shocked so many,
and with your beard,
and your tats,
and your checkered past,
and your Buddha beads,
your drums banging out the first day back,
plus your poem you had the
temerity to read on your first class night,
and some teachers’ apple carts got mighty upset.
Yes feathers were ruffled and ways were rubbed wrong
with your if-it-ain’t-broke-break-it approach,
being wise with your whys,
questioning and challenging everything:
the grading systems and
the homework concepts,
the teams,
the schedules,
the sacred cows,
and the old farts, like me.

But, man, we’re awake now, that’s for damn sure.
Some of us know who our friends are now.
Some trust no one.

And now this place,
well it’s not your mother’s middle school
anymore,
that’s for sure.
The cages got rattled
when kids’ rages you battled
for their sakes,
for our sake,
for their parents don’t have
their yes man anymore,
but you keep your door
open,
if only ajar,
while you check your lodestar
and tackle the next task

or take targets off our backs
or make a meditative moment
to breathe.

And I’m so proud and pleasantly surprised
that our sweet white bread little Board of Ed
had the desire and the balls to hire
you,
and I just hope you last,
man,
and I just hope I last.

A word about the piece. This was in response to a prompt from poet David Lehman in The American Scholar’s weekly column “Next Line, Please.” The prompt was to write a poem of no more than 14 lines, beginning with the line, “It is impossible to love the same person twice,” and ending with the line, “A thought is as real a thing as a cannonball.”

One separate with others around
is still one.
The cold truth is:
alone is our passage.
Though we may stand with another,
raise another,
care for another,
alone is how we came
and how we will go.
The sense of togetherness
is just an illusion.
Some feed the illusion with substances,
some with sex,
others with work,
but in truth alone is
all there
really is.

Alone,
a
lone,
all
one.

I am
all
one
and you
are
too.

I thought you were
so much a part of my life
that you were in my very
soul
but my soul
is sole
and solely mine
and yours is only your own.
One of us will always be
one of us,
and the other
always the other.

Swimming in the
sorrow of knowing your heart
swam in a sorrow of
your own,
my heart longed for
that sense of togetherness again.
When I saw that there was
no effect on your heart
to see mine broken,
I saw at last
that I am alone.
I love you, but I am alone.
When I go I will be alone.
Tonight I am alone.
Always I am alone.

So if I do not drop all
to make things ready
for your eventual appearance,
it is because I am alone.
And you are alone.

It is nothing even to be
angry about anymore.
I am alone,
that is all. Alone.
A stone, alone,
that is all. One.

Exciting possibility and fear
are walking hand-in-hand as each draw near.
I may be setting myself up to fail
by thinking this one is the holy Grail.
I jump the gun and rush into the race.
With finish line too soon I’m face-to-face.
Why do I always do that to myself?
Why can’t I wait? Put prospects on a shelf?
I am my own worst enemy. If it’s
a chance at love, I’ll blow it all to bits.
This kind of habit has grown hard to break.
To try to have and then to eat my cake.

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